Business Ideas Haystack

Rewrite and Republish Out-of-Print Books

Copyright on books lasts something like 70 years, so books published before 1937 are eligible for republishing by anyone if the copyright has not been renewed (which does not happen often).

Of course, most of the knowledge written and published before 1937 is rarely directly applicable to today's modern times. Some re-writing will have to be done on these old works, but modern word processors can make this job easier.

For instance, someone reportedly republished a book on stock investments from the 1920's. They performed a 'search and replace' function via Microsoft Word to automatically replace the names of specific industries and companies with today's industries and companies.

Some books may need to be completely retyped by hand, which can take considerable time. Some books may be scanned page by page, or even two pages at a time, since most scanners today have accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technologies. OCR means the scanner software analyzes the text in the scanned image, and converts it to editable text instead of un-editable text in an image.

Once the masterpiece has been reworked and updated for today's chic, anyone can republish the old work via lulu.com, which then also feeds listings into amazon.com. After that, it is up to the writer how much promotional work they want to do for sales.

It is still a true adage that promotional book work equals sales.

posted by Ideas2NoEnd @ 12:38 PM